Science & Tech Quote by Godfrey Reggio

Reggio isn’t warning that technology “impacts” life; he’s arguing that technology has become life’s container. The shift in his sentence is the tell: he rattles off the familiar categories of concern (environment, religion, economics, politics) only to dismiss that entire framing as too small. That list is bait. The real claim lands after the pivot: technology is no longer a tool we use inside the world; it’s the world’s operating system, the “host” that everything else runs on.

Coming from a filmmaker whose work (especially Koyaanisqatsi and its descendants) treats modernity as a sensory regime, the line reads less like policy critique and more like an ontological diagnosis. “Host” is a loaded word: it suggests dependence, habitation, even parasitism. Nature and culture aren’t simply mediated by devices; they’re re-situated within technical infrastructures that decide what counts as real, urgent, visible. The subtext is control without a controller. No villain is required when the environment of life is redesigned to reward speed, surveillance, quantification, frictionless consumption.

Reggio’s intent is also rhetorical: he’s trying to break the listener’s habit of treating tech as one sector among many. If everything “exists in technology,” then debates about “tech’s effects” risk becoming comforting theater, like arguing about the decor while the building’s foundation is being swapped out. His bleak elegance is that the takeover isn’t dramatic; it’s comprehensive, ambient, and increasingly experienced as normal.